Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 1 (21 page)

Anyhoo, right after the benefit, I hightailed it to see Andréa Burns' CD release show. Her new CD
A Deeper Shade of Red
just came out, and it's fabulous!
And
her act was amazing! She did a long version of "I Feel Pretty" interspersed with stories about all the different times she's played Maria. From when she was first 15 years old (she sang the first verse sprightly and joyous) to years later when she was perhaps too long in the tooth (done à la Karen Morrow) to mere months after giving birth (sung through exhausted tears). She ended it by saying she'd play the role into her eighties and then proceeded to sing it Stritch-style (AKA throatily spoken: "I feel pretty… A-a-a-and entrancing").

The next day, I interviewed Andréa on my Sirius radio show. She talked about being a sophomore at NYU and, for fun, going to an audition for the European tour of
West Side Story
just to experience a real New York audition. They needed a Shark girl who could understudy Maria.
The girls all had to learn a section from "America," which also happened to be the exact section she had learned in her Performing Arts High School in Miami. She completely knew it but that didn't stop her from pretending to slowly learn it and then being able to suddenly nail it. She got through the dance call, and they asked her to sing. She washed off all her Anita make-up, wore a simple top and sang the high C at the end of the "Tonight Quintet." They told her that the tour left in three days for Berlin and they wanted her to be on it. Suffice it to say, her parents were not pleased that her tuition that semester was for naught. But Andréa felt she had no choice. She'd be performing all over Europe with a full orchestra and tons of dancers that worked with Jerome Robbins — including Nicole Fosse. As a matter of fact, Nicole said that her mom would be visiting at the end of November and wanted to cook for the cast. So Andréa spent Thanksgiving eating a turkey cooked by Gwen Verdon!

The sad part was that she was told the woman playing Maria never missed, so there was no way she'd
ever
go on for the role. And therefore, they gave her no rehearsal for the role. And, of course, she had to go on for Maria right at the beginning of the run, with only a few hours' notice and no rehearsal. Haven't people learned their lesson after Shirley MacLaine was told that Carol Haney "never missed"
and
the world was told that the Titanic would never sink? Stop making absolute statements!

Later on, she took over the role of Maria and developed a major crush on her Tony… and wound up marrying him! She's been married to the brilliant (now director) Peter Flynn for ten years, and they have an adorable three-year-old son, Hudson.

Andréa then told me about her first big New York break. When she came back to New York, she ran into someone she went to musical theatre summer camp with (French Woods). P.S.French Woods is the name of the camp, not someone's drag name
.
P.P.S. Juli now goes there. It’s the most amazing place ever!
Anyhoo, her friend was getting a show produced featuring his music, and he asked her to come over to sing through stuff, just so he could hear it out loud. Turns out, he thought she sounded amazing doing his songs, and he (and director Daisy Prince) put her in the show. Her friend was, of course, Jason Robert Brown, and the show was
Songs for a New World
. The hilarious part is that Billy Porter couldn't do the recording because he was under contract with another label, so they had to take Billy out of the already photographed cover photo and stretch and manipulate everyone else's photo to take up the lost space. It's crazy. Look at the cover of the CD, and you'll see "Andréa" sitting on a stool. And by "Andréa," I mean Andréa through a funhouse mirror manipulated by the 1.0 version of Photoshop.

Right now she's the standby for Rosie Perez in
The Ritz
, and in the spring she'll open on Broadway in
In the Heights
. The last time she covered a role was when she was the Belle understudy in
Beauty and the Beast
, and she prides herself on not being one of the many utensils in the ensemble but "the" broom. There was only one, and she was
it
. The devastating story is that she was asked to play Belle for ten performances so Kerry Butler could go on vacation. What’s devastating? Well, her whole family came up from Florida, but she didn't want them to see her first show, so they all bought tickets for the following night. During "Be Our Guest" her heel got caught in one of the tracks on the stage that are used to bring scenery on and off. She fell and knew that something was wrong with her foot. She found out later that she broke it! She got up but didn't know how she was going to finish the number. Suddenly, her hands were grabbed by Lumiere, so he could spin her around. The late, great Patrick Quinn was playing Lumiere, and Andréa started whispering to him, "Don't spin me! I hurt myself!" Unfortunately, he couldn't hear her and assumed she was telling him how excited she was that she was on, so he gave her an extra-vigorous spin! Yay! I'm sure the children loved seeing Belle being spun while her face registered blinding pain. Later on, Patrick was mortified, and he and Andréa always laughed about it. After she was put down, she staggered to the center of the stage to start the signature "Be Our Guest" kick line. Could she do it? She thought, "Well, I am the lead in this number, right in the center. It would sorta make sense if everyone kicks but me." But the trouper in her came out, and she did the full can-can high kicks with a broken foot. She got offstage, said she was injured, and within two seconds her wig and costume was pulled off and she was rushed to the ER. Her mother had decided to come after all because, "I'm not going to have my daughter playing a lead on Broadway while I'm at dinner!" No one knew where her mom was sitting in the audience but they found her quickly. How? They made the announcement "The role of Belle will no longer be played by Andréa Burns" and they looked for the woman who jumped out of her seat! The other headache was that Andréa was getting married in a few weeks. She healed well enough to be able to walk down the aisle without her cast…very carefully. After the wedding, Vicki Clark (who had no idea about the foot) told her, "That was the best walking down the aisle I've seen. I've never seen someone comfortable enough to just take their time."

Andréa's gotten great reviews for her CD, and I think the break-out song is gonna be "BTW, Write Back" by
In the Heights
composer/star Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's about a devoted musical theatre fan who keeps writing to the
myspace
page of her favorite Broadway star. AKA me at age 12 if
myspace
and/or the internet existed back then. Or, quite frankly, computers
.
P.S. Remember myspace? That faded out quicker than my decision to cut out sugar.

At Andréa's show I ran into Ted Sperling, who's getting ready to music direct the Lincoln Center revival of
South Pacific
. I am always devastated to see revivals because usually they shrink the orchestra and it sounds like a synthesizer face-off. But he told me the revival is gonna have the same number of instruments as the original production in the 1940s! Brava!

Friday, I did an interview with
Legally Blonde
's Kate Shindle for a bunch of theatergoers from the Carolinas. Kate was crowned Miss America 1998 and I first asked her about the beginning of the pageant when all 50 girls are onstage and it's suddenly whittled down to 15. I assumed that the girls know who's being ixnayed, but she said that they don't know until that moment. Unfortunately, the losing girls have to come back throughout the pageant and perform back-up, and Kate said we should watch closely because there are always a couple of girls missing 'cause they're too traumatized/raccoon-eyed to continue. The cool thing about her winning is that Kate's platform was AIDS education, and she toured all over the country talking about it. She said she would visit schools in the Midwest and Deep South where they would normally never discuss such things, but because she was Miss America, they would let her come to the school and educate the kids. Brava!

Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara saw the Saturday matinee of
The Ritz
, which was super cool. First, because I love them both, and secondly because Jerry was the original gangster, Carmine Vespucci, in the Broadway and film version of
The Ritz
. After the show, they met the cast, and our current Carmine, Lenny Venito, got to meet Jerry. Jerry told us that, during the original run of the show, someone broke into the dressing room of the theatre and stole the mink coat and gun that's featured heavily in Act Two. Jerry ran to the stage manager freaking out because the second act couldn't happen without those props. The stage manager said he'd handle it and left Jerry there. Ten minutes later, he came back with a gun and a coat. "Where'd you get them?" asked Jerry. The stage manager explained, "I got the gun from a cop outside, and I got the mink from a lady in the fourteenth row!"

OK, everyone. Here’s hoping that by the time this column comes back next week, Broadway will be back to business!

Max, Laura and Hilarity at
The Ritz

November 20, 2007

What? The strike is still on? Didn't I specifically ask Local One and the producers to end it? Oy! It's definitely been a hardship on audience members and everyone involved, but the most devastating thing about the strike is that it took place during BC/EFA's audience appeal fundraising period. They lose $40,000 a
day
! And that money is counted on by AIDS organizations all over the world… soup kitchens, hospices, etc. If you get a chance, go to
BCEFA.org
and buy something from their holiday catalogue.

This week I interviewed Max Crumm and Laura Osnes, who won the
You're the One That I Want
competition and are now playing Danny and Sandy in
Grease
. I started my career on
Playbill.com
writing about their TV show, which makes me feel a special connection to them, plus I played piano for the last
Grease!
revival, so I also feel a little like the Sheila to their Maggie. (AKA, jaded hag to their starry-eyed naiveté).

Laura grew up in the Midwest and worked as an understudy in
Aladdin
, which was playing at the Minneapolis Children's Theater. One day, the two leads were doing the scene where they're supposed to back into each other and they wound up completely colliding. They had to be taken to the hospital (they really got injured… including the Aladdin completely chipping his tooth), and Laura and the other understudy got to go on. She was so excited because it was a two-show day… and then was outraged when the leads wound up going on that night! How dare they be so professional? But the sparks between the two understudies flew… and now they're married!

She got cast as Sandy in
Grease
at a Minnesota dinner theater and had to take a weekend off to audition for
You're the One That I Want
. Max was in California at the time and thought it could be fun to audition for the TV show. He wasn't sure if he would or not, but happened to wake up at 6 AM on the morning of the audition, so he figured that since he was up, he would go.

I talked with them about the ludicrous moment when all the contestants were forced to stand and sing in unison, and supposedly based on that performance, producer David Ian would make cuts. How stupid did the TV show producers think we were!? Why would the final decision be made based on how they all sounded singing a cappella? The cuts were obviously made beforehand, and the producers thought it would be a creative way to do them. Laura said that they triple checked that everyone was in their right position before they started because David Ian walked around (wearing a stern expression) and carrying a clipboard that obviously had all the cut people's position on it, and they wanted to make sure he wouldn't cut the wrong person. She also said that if you watched it, it lasts an arduous 7 minutes on the TV show, but it actually lasted 1,000 times
longer
when they were filming it.

We discussed that final episode, and Max busted the people on the chat boards who said that Austin didn't care about his mother because he didn't hug her right after he lost. He actually ran past her to do a quick change because he and Ashley were devastatingly forced to be in the ensemble while Max and Laura sang the finale as Danny and Sandy. Can you imagine? "Barbra Streisand, you've lost the Tony Award to Carol Channing. Now, take off that gown, put on a frock and dance back-up for 'Before the Parade Passes By.'"

This week also had some hilarity at
The Ritz
. Brooks Ashmanskas has a line near the end of Act Two where he pretends to be the Private Eye whose name is Brick. "It's me, Bunny! Brick!" Well, the line he said before that got a really big laugh, and it sort of threw him. Unfortunately, it threw him enough for him to then say, "It's me, Bunny!
Brooks
!" It was an amazing moment to watch because as soon as he said, "Brooks," he realized what he did, and all the color drained from his face. After I said my next line, "Careful, Googie!" I started whispering "Careful, Rosie." I always try to maintain a mix of 90% professionalism, 10% acting out.